by Col. Patrick W. Lang (Ret.) Someone asked me if I experience hostility from the US military (active or retired). Col. Patrick W. Lang (Ret.), a highly decorated retired senior officer of U.S. Military Intelligence and U.S....
Read MoreFinally – someone speaks out!
The following is by “T.J. Snodgrass II,” for my blog:
Of course, no one on the US side has condemned this facade — in fact, some US apparatchik probably gave the Shia and Kurds the idea.
From the Oct. 4, 2005 story at BBC NEWS (PDF version):
The United Nations has criticised changes to Iraq’s electoral law that make it harder for Iraqis to reject the draft constitution.
The two-thirds majority needed in three provinces to defeat the constitution will now be counted from all registered – as opposed to actual – voters.On Sunday Shia and Kurdish members of parliament pushed through the changes in the referendum rules on 15 October.
Sunni Arabs reacted angrily to the amendments on Monday.
They believed many registered voters may not show up at the polls because of violence.
Pat Lang
Personal Blog: Sic Semper Tyrannis 2005 || Bio || CV
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Novel: The Butcher’s Cleaver (download free by chapter, PDF format)
“Drinking the Kool-Aid,” Middle East Policy Council Journal, Vol. XI, Summer 2004, No. 2
by Col. W. Patrick Lang (Ret.)
The godlike reference by Bill O’Reilly to the supposed massacre by the 82nd Airborne Division of German prisoners at Malmedy during the Bulge is on this page.
Crooks & Liars: Fox News Trancript: O’REILLY: General, you need to look at the Malmady (ph) massacre in World War II and the 82nd Airborne.
More from the October 4, 2005 Fox transcript:
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In fact it was soldiers of the 1st SS Panzer Divsion, specifically the Regiment Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler who massacred AMERICAN prisoners at Malmedy. Their commander (Jochen Peiper) was tried for this crime after the war and acquitted largely because of the testimony of an American officer prisoner held at Peiper’s headquarters who said that Peiper never knew about it. Amusing.
As Clark said in this exchange, O’Reilly should apologise to the 82nd. Either that or they should go visit him.
But the “real deal” here is the segment on TDS (with VIDEO) in which Myers tells McCain that people who served in the VN war don’t understand Iraq. McCain was annoyed. Now I am sure that it is true that Myers served in VN and that he does not understand Iraq. Myers was a fighter jock or some such flying creature in VN. The fighter guys’ life consisted of getting up in the morning, having a nice breakfast, getting briefed, taking off, flying to the target, doing “whatever,” landing at the base, having a nice dinner, watching a Filipino floor show complete with watching nice looking girls perform “Country Roads,” and then going to bed early to get enough “crew rest.” The next day – the same thing. You don’t learn much about counterinsurgency that way.
Now, before the cards and letter start I would like to stipulate a couple of things:
– I owe my life to the USAF on any number of occasions.
– I always enjoyed the floor show whenever I got the chance to go visit one of their bases.
Nevertheless, I can only hope that General Pace will have more common sense than this.
For the record and always:
“Counterinsurgency = Political Action + Civic Action + Counterguerrilla Operations”
“Revolutionary War = Political Action + Civic Action + Guerilla War (Guerillas + sabotage + terrorism)”
I learned that from several Frenchmen including Bernard Fall who taught me at Ft. Bragg.
Pat Lang
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Sic Semper Tyrannis 2005 || Bio || CV
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Novel: The Butcher’s Cleaver (download free by chapter, PDF format)
“Drinking the Kool-Aid,” Middle East Policy Council Journal, Vol. XI, Summer 2004, No. 2
by Col. Patrick Lang (Ret.)
This area could — if substantial Iraqi forces are not added, or if U.S. forces are trimmed during a pullout — foretell a future where Sunni tribes with ties to the insurgency rule large parts of Iraq. Antonio Castaneda for the AP (PDF)
If you read this carefully, you will hear the marines telling you that what we are doing along the Syrian border is necessary but inconclusive in terms of the ultimate outcome in the war.
There have to be IRAQI troops who can hold the towns, especially the towns in this western beduin-descended Sunni Arab part of Iraq. Without that, we can do this kind of thing forever.
The administration is now considering further action against Syria in the evident belief that the Syrian government is more than a passive actor in the also beduin-descended area of eastern Syria. Evidently Elliot Abrams and his NSC crew wuold liek the air forces to bomb a group of towns inside Syria.
Both DIA and CIA have told the NSC that the evidence is inconclusive concerning Syrian government involvement in cross-border infiltration but, no matter.
Maybe they can come up with another Office of Special Plans (OSP) to do “better analysis.”
Personal Blog: Sic Semper Tyrannis 2005 || Bio || CV
Recommended Books || More BooTrib <a href="Posts
Novel: The Butcher’s Cleaver (download free by chapter, PDF format)
“Drinking the Kool-Aid,” Middle East Policy Council Journal, Vol. XI, Summer 2004, No. 2
by Pat Lang
“DeLay is very different. He is the Republican paymaster, one of the authors of the K Street Project and the driving force behind a vicious, organised demonisation and attempted marginalisation of Democrats that for sheer, unabashed political animus is unlike anything else witnessed in an advanced democracy. Politicians fight their political foes by fair means or foul, but trying to exterminate them is new territory.” — Will Hutton in Sunday’s The Guardian.
It may come to be that in the end the neocon Jacobins and the merely megalomaniacal like Rumsfeld will be thought of as having been “taken for a ride” along with the rest of us.
Rumsfeld has a certain owlish appeal in his self-assigned role as the “Grinch who Stole Christmas.” One could learn to appreciate his doddering curmudgeonly figure as a “talking head” infesting the Sunday Newsathons.
The neocons? It seems increasingly possible that these intellectual poseurs, now mainly roosting at AEI and elsewhere, have been duped by the Iranians in the greatest intelligence coup since Felix Dzershinsky ran the anti-Soviet underground from Moscow as chief of the Cheka. “Curve Ball?” Hah! This curve broke straight through the “strike zone.”
No. History will probably reserve a very special and perhaps unique place in one of the lower circles of the Inferno for the folk of the “K Street Project.” They deserve it for poisoning the well of American political life. They will get “top billing.”
It is odd how many Texans there are in this mess. “Lawyers, bankers and oil men. Lawyers, bankers and oil men.” A Texan told me that these are the categories of men who run Texas in our time. Forget the cowboys. Forget the Comanche. Forget everything but the money and power. That’s what a lot of them have done. I think their time is coming.
I guess we should add a fourth category to the list, former “exterminators.”
Personal Blog: Sic Semper Tyrannis 2005 || Bio || CV
Recommended Books || More BooTrib <a href="Posts
Novel: The Butcher’s Cleaver (download free by chapter, PDF format)
“Drinking the Kool-Aid,” Middle East Policy Council Journal, Vol. XI, Summer 2004, No. 2
